California governor releases coronavirus reopening report card
OAKLAND, Calif (KTVU) - California Governor Gavin Newsom says his decisions to begin easing up on stay-at-home restrictions are supported by state data over the past two weeks showing improvements in six criteria the governor laid out last month.
Newsom released a COVID-19 report card Monday detailing the state's progress. A graph showed two flat lines indicating California's number of COVID-19 hospitalizations and ICU cases has been stable since April 20.
State reopening roadmap report card
Dr. Michael Stacey, the Chief Medical Officer for Lifelong Medical Care clinics in the East Bay, says he's glad to see Gov. Newsom release the report card Monday, and make decisions driven by data.
He says the report helps explain which areas need to be improved before restrictions are listed.
One area is ensuring sufficient supplies of personal protective equipment or PPE. The report card indicates hundreds of millions of surgical and N-95 masks are on order.
"As we start to do things that require more human interactions, we are going to use up our personal protective equipment more quickly and I'm a little bit concerned about making sure that we have enough," said Dr. Stacey.
The report card says California has ramped up its hospital surge capacity and is ready to handle any future outbreaks with 14 facilities, thousands of beds, and more than 10,000 ventilators on standby.
The state also reached its May 1 goal, increasing COVID-19 test capacity to 25,000 tests per day. Gov. Newsom said last month that would be just the first target, with a second higher goal later in the year.
Dr.Stacey says he also worries that as stay-at-home orders relax, any increase in COVID-19 cases could outpace the ability of contact tracers or investigators to follow up.
"There's just not enough people to do all of the contact tracing required for every case of COVID," said Dr. Stacey.
California has 61 health agencies, 58 county health departments and 3 municipal health agencies in Pasadena, Long Beach and Berkeley.
Governor Newsom says right now only about two dozen are actively able to do COVID-19 contact tracing, because there are only 2,845 contact tracers in the state.
Governor Newsom said Monday a new online training academy will help ramp up those numbers dramatically.
"First phase 10,000, second phase an additional 10,000," said Governor Newsom.
In partnership with UCSF and UCLA, government workers who are not able to work in their regular jobs will get training. The training has been tried out in a pilot run in San Francisco.
"We've been training librarians and city attorneys and assessors in San Francisco for the last few weeks. We're on the fourth wave of training them," said Susie Welty, a public health expert and UCSF Dep. Director of Surveillance for the Global Strategic Information division.
Welty is part of the UCSF team. She says the contact tracers will be working remotely doing the contract tracing and alerts by phone.
She says contact tracers alone can't be effective unless the public does its part and public health departments make sure people in quarantine get the support services needed.
"We're asking them to give up a paycheck in very tumultuous economic time and that's a really difficult thing for them. So we need to make sure they have what they need," said Welty.
"If we...give them an order to stay home for 14 days but they can't possibly because they need to get food for their family or they need to go out and get things, then it will obviously fail. The whole contact tracing so it needs to be paired with a strong public health response," said Welty.
The UCSF and UCLA online training will begin Wednesday May 6.